Locals say blue crab catches plummeting

Tuesday

Apr 23, 2013 at 7:59 PM

Local blue crab catches are reported more scarce than ever this year, and nobody is sure why. “There are absolutely no crabs,” said Keith Watts, Crab Task Force representative for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. “We're not catching anything. It's ridiculous.”

Chance RyanStaff Writer

Local blue crab catches are reported more scarce than ever this year, and nobody is sure why. “There are absolutely no crabs,” said Keith Watts, Crab Task Force representative for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. “We're not catching anything. It's ridiculous.”Watts does most of his crabbing in Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, but he said the same holds true throughout the rest of the state. “This year, we're catching 50 pounds on 240 traps, versus 240 pounds last year for No. 1's (blue crab) and about the same the year before that,” he said. “We should be catching 180 to 200 pounds at least.”Watts said he hopes he's wrong, but from what he's seeing, you can forget about eating much blue crab this year. “The waters warmed up,” he said. “We've had high tide, we had low tide, we've had muddy water, we had clean water, we've had fresh water, salt water — we've had it all, and there's been no crabs in none of it.” Watts has made up his mind the BP oil spill of 2010, which leaked roughly 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, is responsible for the declining blue crab population.“It's just too much of coincidence for it not to be,” he said. “Crabs live for two to three years. The oil spill was in 2010. You do the math.” Saturday was the three-year anniversary of the spill. In the meantime, Watts said he's counting on scientists and researchers to make haste and bring the facts to light so the problem can be addressed accordingly before it's too late. Julie Anderson, an assistant professor at the LSU Agcenter and Louisiana Sea Grant, said the blue crab harvest reported in 2012 by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries indicated an average season. “Statewide, it appears that the numbers and the value are about the same,” she said. “But individual fishermen are getting hit very differently.”The weather is still pretty cold and windy this year, she noted, and blue crabs are sluggish creatures that typically don't crawl into traps until it gets warmer. “Until it really warms up and we're still not catching anything into the summer, the state and scientists will become a lot more concerned,” she said.Anderson has done research on the effect of oil and dispersants on local crabs, and so far she said she hasn't seen anything directly linked to the spill. For one study, she exposed larval blue crabs to the chemical dispersants used to clean up the oil spill. But she worked with a much higher concentration than what was used in the spill. Anderson said she found it did not make much difference in the crabs' death rate. However, when she exposed mud crabs to a combination of oil and dispersant, the oil broke down more easily and was absorbed by the crabs. More of them died as a result. The low blue crab harvest can be attributed to several causes other than the oil spill itself, she said, such as the state's fresh water diversion program, which opened Mississippi River floodgates in an effort to prevent the leaking oil from invading sensitive inland marshes. In 2011, the opening of the Morganza Spillway to keep the Mississippi River from flooding into urban areas again exposed blue crab and oysters to fresh water. These species rely on water with high salt content. Still, Anderson said she and other scientists are not ruling out oil spill implications. Mike Dupre, owner of Captain Allen's Bait and Tackle in Chauvin, said he's gone from averaging about 200,000 pounds of blue crab per year to not even reaching 50,000 pounds this year. In two years, Dupre said he's gone from having 10 to 12 steady crabbers working for him down to one. “Nobody is even going out because all they're going to do is waste time and gas,” he said. When he can get blue crab, Dupre charges $24 for a dozen. “Something is going on,” he said. “You can't just go from having all this crab to having no crab. I can't make it just selling bait and tackle. I need seafood.” O'Neil Sevin, owner of Bait House Seafood in Chauvin, agrees that blue crab catches have drastically declined, the reasons of which are many. “Things aren't quite right,” he said. “But with the way the weather has been cooperating this year, things may pick up later on.”Other than speculation that the oil spill has had an effect on the reproductive cycle of blue crab, which Sevin doesn't rule out, he said other factors may be just as likely. It's possible that certain areas have been overharvested, Sevin said, and fish species such as sheepshead, drum and red fish, which sometimes become overpopulated, will eat the crabs. Still, Sevin said the price for blue crab is simply too high, and the locals won't buy it. As a result, they're shipped to places where people can afford to buy them.Asked whether the declining blue crab population makes him nervous, Sevin said “not yet.” “You can always go ahead and put a big question mark on something like this, but it's a little premature to get worried,” he said. “With all the hurricanes and disasters we've been through, we always survive.” The next Louisiana Crab Task Force meeting will be held at 2 p.m. May 7 at the Wildlife and Fisheries' Waddill Outdoor Education Center, 4142 N. Flannery Road, Baton Rouge.

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